Weight Maintenance - the real challenge!

I come across so many people who tell me that they have been dieting for many years – in some cases, since they were a young child.  And yet, here they still are trying to lose weight.

Dieting has such negative connotations – it implies restriction and forbidden foods – things that aren’t sustainable. I often say weight loss is the easier part – it’s the maintenance that is the challenge.

Losing weight is a two step process – so regardless of how a person has lost weight, it’s really about how they maintain their weight loss.  And there lies the challenge.

Education, equipping yourself with tools and having the right support team is crucial to long term weight maintenance success.

Let’s look at each of those factors.

Education:

• How much food do you now need to intake to sustain this new weight?
• How much exercise do you need to do?
• Understanding food energy – how to read food labels, how to modify recipes, how to eat out / have takeaways etc.  Often people say to me that they don’t want to talk calories / kilojoules, but unfortunately, this is part of the process of understanding your body’s individual requirements and about how to include food in a positive way rather than leading into the dieting cycle of food restriction.
• What other factors influence your food and exercise routine?
  • The environment that we live and work in – such as time and stress management.  If we don’t manage our stress and time, the outcome is often our food intake and exercise isn’t managed.
  • Our behaviours – if we are an emotive eater or have other eating cues such as sight and smells of food, we need to develop and practise new strategies that don’t include food.  I’m not saying that we cure these eating cues, but we need to manage them differently so that food isn’t the only option.
  • Our lifestyle – have there been changes in our lifestyle that have had an outcome of different routines for food and exercise such as a holiday, visitors staying, long weekends etc.

Equip yourself with tools:

• Use a food and exercise diary – whether it be an app or notebook.  By recording, you can see if you are on track or perhaps where you need to make some changes.
• Buy a set of bathroom scales.  You need to weigh yourself regularly and respond to change straight away.  Numbers on scales should be as important as your bank account balance.  If suddenly your bank account is $1000 down, you don’t say “It will be OK next week”.  Do you?  No, there’s panic and you stop everything else you are doing until you resolve it.  We need our scales balance to be just as important as this.  Click here to read some important strategies for monitoring your weight.
• Have kitchen scales – close enough is not good enough.  Regularly check your portions such as your meat amount.
• Have cup measures available – check your cooked rice / pasta amounts.  Leave a cup measure in the cereal box.  This takes the guess work out of amounts.

Your Support Team

• Losing weight and maintaining your weight losses is not just about you signing on for this change, it’s also about educating family, colleagues, friends about your changes and recruiting them onto your support team.
• Surround yourself with supportive people who will work with you rather than saying “come on one little bit won’t hurt.”
• Know your local shops where you can get the takeaway you want, the times that the local pool is open, what days and times you can join the fitness group in the park etc.
• Have a health professional also on your team so you can touch base regularly and make sure you are still on the right track for maintenance.  This could be a dietitian or your GP.

So let’s stop the Dieting Cycle and not just lose weight, but put the right processes in place to convert this weight loss into successful weight maintenance.